Forging a Healthy and Beautiful Body

Abstract

Chapter 4 examines the popular media’s campaign to promote female physical culture in order to show how notions of health and beauty were used to promote and justify women’s exercise and how these conceptions redefined traditional ideas of femininity. Physical culture’s appeal was based on its combination of a modern agenda, which focused on the social rewards of individual physical fitness and beauty, and nationalist and eugenic concerns. A well-built, healthy, beautiful female body went hand in hand with a vigorous nation.